"Totally coup, yo."

Murphy

Bipartisan Kool-Aid Threatens Media Ecosystem

BY IAN MURPHY

It’s all relative

While it’s borderline retarded to call the BP disaster “Obama’s Katrina,” like comparing apples and a bunch of dead black people, it’s not entirely unfair of Sarah Palin to bring up Obama’s ties to the unsafe oil giant.

As emotionally satisfying as it is to pin this black eco-death on Palin’s moronic “Drill, baby, drill!” ethos, it’s totally meaningless, because, you know, she is meaningless.

The partisan slick talk in the Gulf is killing objectivity — an already threatened species in the media marshlands. The relativism and blame-gaming obscures one very basic truism in American politics: fossil fuels are still a bipartisan issue. Seeing the established “left” and the “right’ snipe at each other over the web and TV is to watch the American people being lied to through omission.

New Editor-in-Chief Ian Murphy raps about The BEAST and more with contributor D. Armenta

…

Say, Mr. Murphy—can I call you Ian?

Of course, Mr. Murphy is my father’s name. [Insincere chuckle]

Is the Buffalo Beast dead, or what? First you stopped printing, then went to website, then all posts stopped. What’s going on?

The BEAST isn’t dead, but it is starving. It’s very difficult to maintain the financial viability of any media outlet, especially in the internet age, and our particular brand of vulgarity has never played well with advertisers. While our abject lack of operational capital has been apparent, well, forever, it never seemed to bother us. But this winter was a demoralizing time, for a bunch of reasons, and we basically just dropped the ball. However, as this sycophantic interview and the other fresh posts suggest, I have picked up that ball. And I hope to accomplish some kind of sports metaphor with said ball in the near future.

The long overdue story of how Roger Pielke Jr., Alternet & I caused the next holocaust

BY IAN MURPHY

“The phrase ‘climate change denier’ is meant to be evocative of the phrase ‘holocaust denier.’” – Dr. Roger Pielke Jr., political scientist, environmental studies professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, blogger and Senior Fellow at The Breakthrough Institute (TBI) think tank

“‘Global warming denier’ has long been viewed as a loaded term, Wikipedia notes, because it conjures an association with Holocaust deniers.” – Ted Nordhaus & Michael Shellenberger, founders of TBI

50. Tiger Woods

Charges: Rose to god-like celebrity and tycoon-level riches smacking a ball into a hole with a stick. His promiscuity with commercial endorsements makes his sexual dalliances seem frivolous by contrast. Cheated on his Swedish supermodel wife with over a dozen women, all of whom look like “Rock of Love” washouts.Exhibit A: “Who is your new boy toy?”Sentence: Zero stroke penalty.

But I think the ‘Terrorist Horseman’ is the one that could shift our whole society toward strict controls. Just a few really ghastly terrorists incidents would be enough to cause a sea change in public opinion.

“Consummately prescient, he typed the above in response to a collection of essays which were bound with the reissue of his 1981 novella True Names, which was about virtual reality. What do you think of that, Pepper?

-IM

“Where is that? For real. Do you have any conditions I should know about?”

Defeated right-wing lunatics may be crying “SOCIALISM!” but REAL socialism is actually pretty cool. And to prove it, we talked to evil socialist, rocker and PhD of Economics Dr. Karl Widerquist.

Ian Murphy: Give it to us straight, Doc. Will the economy ever dance again?

Karl Widerquist: People are spending way too much time worrying about this recession and recessions in general. A recession is a decline of a few percentage points in our total economic output. Compared to our real economic problems, that is of secondary importance. Even if we had a repeat of the Great Depression, and output declined by 25% our capacity to produce goods for each person would fall back to the level of about 1987.

“But, what?” I wondered, pinning my bright red fedora to the curly afro-wig. I checked my face paint in the side mirror and smiled.

“But,” she reflected, steering the wheel, “it is sort of mean.”

“Like teaching a small child that they’re going to hell?” I shot back. “Straighten up and fly right, Little Jimmy, or it’s Satan’s pitchfork—right in your ass—for all motherfucking eternity!” I illustrated by repeatedly stabbing the dashboard with my balloon-animal fish.

“OK!” she relented. “But what’s the point?”

I slapped my forehead and said, “It’s not that cryptic! What these people believe is a fucking joke. I’m dressed as a clown. What—what—what’s not to get?”

We all know the economy has taken a beating.1 But it seems like no one (including the – HA! – “economists”) has the slightest “idea” what to do about “it.”

In fact, from Tim Geithner to Larry Summers, the people in charge of fixing the problem are the very villains who helped make this mess! They’ve had every chance to redeem themselves, but their policies are proving as bankrupt as the US Treasury.

Well, America, it’s high time we grab the bull by the horns (you may want to put on gloves; you don’t know where they’ve been2) and steer the rampaging beast toward the red flag (not code for Communism3) of economic prosperity.

Ingenuity has always been our economic engine.4 And what we need now to overcome this recession is creativity – that can-do American spirit of invention! So here, I offer some new, practical ways to stimulate the economy:

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